Beauty is a top-selling category on Amazon, which makes it a target for unauthorized sellers who can impact your bottom line. Protecting your beauty brand has never been more imperative to maintaining your equity, but it can be done.
Beauty and personal care will be Amazon’s most profitable categories in 2024, along with ‘kitchen and home’. Subsequently, Amazon makes up around 14.5% of the beauty market, overtaking huge competitors such as Walmart and making it the third biggest way consumers in the US research beauty products.
Big beauty brands such as Lancôme have appropriated the opportunity to sell on Amazon and amplify their audience and profits, but this option comes at a cost.
In this article, we partnered with FordeBaker to highlight the opportunity and brand protection threats for beauty brands selling on Amazon.
What works for beauty on Amazon?
According to Tom Baker, CEO and Co-Founder of FordeBaker, a premium Amazon agency, “Beauty is the perfect match for Amazon. First and foremost, your customers expect to find your products on Amazon. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, but you have to have a solid reason not to trade on Amazon.”
He adds, “Given the natural frequency people use and replenish their beauty products, it’s tough to build up the operational capacity to handle this volume purely through a DTC strategy. That’s partly why traditional Bricks & Mortar retail is so important. The same theory applies to Amazon. The bottom line is Amazon is great for creating customer loyalty. Outsourcing fulfilment, particularly subscription, to Amazon, enables brands to get on with what they do best: building the brand, creating great products and engaging with their customers.”
The bottom line is Amazon is great for creating customer loyalty.
Amazon has also been the perfect vehicle for international expansion and acquiring new customers. Never mind the capital investment and risk of localising your website, creating international logistics, and finding your audience. The infrastructure AND the customers are already there with Amazon. That’s not to say you shouldn’t localise your DTC strategy, but Amazon is the fastest and least risky way to start expanding.
Here are tips to enhance your beauty brand and get started on Amazon:
- Create a strong brand presence
Create an Amazon Storefront for your company. This is a space to showcase all your products and have consistent branding. This storefront will show you are an official seller and enhance your trustworthiness.
- Optimize product listings
Be sure to include A+ content for each product, including visually appealing product photographs and information. Ensure all pictures are professionally taken, showing every angle of your product and use video to bring your product to life.
Use bullet points or other visual devices to make the copy clear and concise. This will create a smooth flow of listings that encourages visitors to keep scrolling.
This helps to provide potential customers with all the information they need to purchase, shows your authority and trustworthiness, and makes your content more visually appealing and persuasive.
- Amazon SEO
Think of Amazon as a search engine, just like Google.
Conduct a keyword analysis on Amazon, incorporate appropriate keywords into product title descriptions, and include backend keyword slots to enhance your search visibility. This helps you to be discovered by new audiences who aren’t searching directly for your brand.
- Pricing
Coordinate promotions exclusive to official products to ensure that buying directly from your brand or authorized sellers is beneficial.
Since most customers could buy your brand for the first time, this is a great way to introduce your product to more price-sensitive consumers. Once they are introduced to your product and see how impressive it is, they may be less price-sensitive as they know the value of your goods.
- Manage reviews
Customer reviews can significantly impact whether someone buys your product or not. Product pages that include customer reviews convert 3.5 times more.
Encourage reviews and reply to all of them, whether negative or positive. How you deal with negative reviews will say a lot about your business and is an opportunity to address any issues.
You can even add your brand personality to these comments to create a brand that people like to deal with.
- Monitor
You must monitor your metrics on Amazon or anywhere else you sell. By gathering data and analyzing it, you can establish what products do well and whether there’s any seasonality in sales, which will facilitate cultivating your content.
Experiment and find out what works and what doesn’t for your business.
The challenges for ecommerce beauty businesses on Amazon
Beauty brands are facing a cascade of revenue leakage through unauthorized sellers, counterfeit products, and parallel imported beauty products on Amazon, causing beauty ecommerce companies to lose money, possibly lose their Buy Box, and face impairment to their reputation.
Many of your customers on Amazon could be new to your brand. At Lancôme, this accounts for 73% of their consumers on Amazon, so if these customers purchase a counterfeit product instead and find the quality poor, this could mean losing that customer forever.
Protecting your brand is essential when you sell on Amazon or other ecommerce platforms.
Advantages and opportunities abound, but asserting control of your brand, products, and customers on Amazon is vital to realise the value. You must gain control if third parties have stolen a march on your launch onto Amazon.
This can be tricky, but you can take many actions.
By optimising your brand on Amazon, you can protect your brand and avoid revenue leakage damage. By creating a solid brand presence on Amazon, you can reduce the likelihood of customers mistakenly believing unauthorized sellers to be genuine, and it will benefit them to buy directly from you or regulated sellers.
Protecting your brand from unauthorized sellers, counterfeit beauty products, and other fraud means regaining control of your business and brand narrative.
- You control who sells your products.
You want to ensure that whoever sells your products provides the same excellent customer service you would like, which means choosing third-party sellers you know will embody your brand’s values.
You decide who represents your company, which helps to accrue loyal customers without lower acquisition costs and a higher lifetime value.
- Maintain consistent pricing
If you are a high-end beauty brand, you want to maintain the value of your product, but if unauthorized sellers price your products lower, this could diminish the value of your product.
Your company could have to compete by price, negating all the hard work invested into creating a brand reputation where your customers aren’t as concerned about cost. By selecting sellers, you set the price and can maintain this value and appropriate pricing for your product.
Adding his thoughts on optimising your pricing and average selling price (ASP), Tom Baker, CEO and Co-Founder of FordeBaker, believes, “Controlling the supply chain 100% is understandably extremely difficult. Some resellers will find their way onto Amazon. If they’re undercutting you and they have legitimate products, then you’ll need to deploy a repricing strategy to maintain the buy box AND deter resellers from continuing to compete.”
Ensure product authenticity and quality.
Many counterfeit goods have been sold and are of much lower quality. For most consumers, buying your product on Amazon is the first time they experience your product, and it could be the last time they do so.
The consumer may assume you allow this to happen, which reflects poorly on your brand. Why would a consumer take the chance to buy your product if they’re not sure if it will be a genuine item?
The solution is to enroll with Amazon’s Brand Registry service. This enables you to use content and advertising features unique to the trademark owner. You’ll also have far more control over the product page content, meaning you can bring it up to your standards and build trust with the customer.
Brand reputation management
Your brand reputation is everything. People buy from brands that resonate with them, share the same values, and have an affinity for them. Without your carefully crafted brand reputation, your product may assimilate with the many others on the market. Damage to your brand reputation could prevent you from competing with competitors and decrease your equity.
Remember that no matter how loyal a customer might be, Amazon is an unlimited shelf of competing products only a click away. Holding a customer’s attention through persuasive product page content and attractive offers is only possible if you fully control the listing. If resellers are active or started selling before you, gaining control isn’t always straightforward. A combination of Brand REgistry, repricing and advertising will signal to Amazon that you should be considered the ‘winning contribution’ for that listing.
Protect your ecommerce brand.
Brand gating can help when sellers in the Amazon Brand Registry Program can protect their brand by preventing unauthorized sellers.
Ecommerce beauty brands can register their information, and Amazon will implement predictive protections to prevent harmful listings.
But it means you must report these yourself and gather the evidence, which can be complex.
Use brand protection software.
It is impossible to manually fight against the tide of unauthorized sellers, counterfeit goods, and parallel imports. That’s why using brand protection software like GreyScout can detect, authenticate, and take enforcement action to recover your revenue.
How GreyScout can help you protect your brand
At GreyScout, our brand protection software can protect your brand for you, saving you hours and helping you increase your bottom line.
Don’t let unauthorized sellers steal your revenue. Take control of your brand to ensure the long-term success of your business.
